Paperbacks

The Missing Shade of Blue, Jennie Erdal Abacus, £12.99How does one find happiness in the modern world?

The Scottish philosopher David Hume provides the framework – and the title – for this fictional exploration of life and love through the prism of Edgar Manson, a failed philosopher turned translator who comes to Edinburgh from Paris to work on a translation of Hume’s essays. He becomes friends with the quixotic philosophy professor Harry Sanderson and his younger, artist wife, Carrie, and as their relationship develops so too does his awareness of the particular “shade of blue” that is missing from his life. Edgar hopes that Hume’s spirit will “infuse the project”, and it is clear Erdal is equally captivated by the philosopher’s story. All too often, however, philosophical discussions on human nature and the meaning of life sit uncomfortably within the narrative, suffocating what might otherwise be an engaging novel. Its subtitle is A Philosophical Adventure, and the reader is left to wonder if it might have profited from less philosophy and more adventure.

Freya McClements

On the Floor

Aifric Campbell,

Serpent’s Tail, £12.99

Aifric Campbell made it to this year’s Orange Prize longlist for this sparky novel set in a world she knew well, the brash, “loadsamoney” environment of an investment-bank trading floor in London in the late 1980s. The Irishwoman was the first female MD at Morgan Stanley in London and worked there for 10 years. For her latest novel she has bravely made her central character a banker – unlikely to elicit much sympathy these days – and a young woman who is in no way likable. Geri Molloy is 28, already burned out by the exhausting demands of being one of the boys, horrible to everyone, not least to herself, and on the way to alcoholism. Slowly she begins to realise just what her mega-salary job is costing her and that the banking world is on the cusp of change. The slick pace and the atmosphere of gobby vulgarity are so different from Campbell’s previous work that they confirm her as a versatile, smart, highly readable writer.

Bernice Harrison

At Last

Edward St Aubyn

Picador, £7.99

If you think super-rich people are self-indulgent parasites who must be crushed for the good of humanity, this is your book. Patrick Melrose’s mother is dead, and what a piece of work she was. During Patrick’s childhood, she failed to protect him (and other innocents) from his monstrous father. Think rape. Think surgery without painkillers. You get the idea. Now that she’s blessedly dead, it turns out that she’s disinherited Patrick in favour of a hippy-dippy cult. Charming. Patrick still has to suffer through her funeral, which is excruciating thanks to the presence of his hideous relations. Not that Patrick is exactly an upstanding, ethical, responsible, ideal male, but given his backstory I was willing to cut him a bit of slack. There’s a lovely payoff when a particularly piggish character drops dead. This book is delightfully well written, with each sentence beautifully crafted.

 Mary Feely

The Last Gift

Abdulrazak Gurnah

Bloomsbury, £7.99

“One day, long before the troubles, he slipped away without saying a word to anyone and never went back.” On that day Abbas left Zanzibar and his young, pregnant wife. Forty-three years later, when he collapses at the front door of his English home, Abbas realises that his past cannot be outrun. While convalescing, regaining speech and mobility, he rails against the weakness of his body, but the weakness of his character haunts him even more; whether he should tell his wife and children the truth about where he came from becomes central to his beleaguered existence. Gurnah’s beautiful prose casts a gentle light over this story of family, immigrants and the search for identity. As Abbas’s children face the harsh realities of life as “second-generation” citizens, his daughter’s struggles to find her identity within the family prove to be as difficult as those in the outside world. But she does, eventually, remember that if her father’s love “was clumsy, it was also devoted”.

Claire Looby

Mouchette

Georges Bernanos

New York Review Classics, £7.99

The Parisian Catholic Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) was acutely aware of human cruelty. The understandably sullen peasant girl whose tragedy this extraordinary narrative records is 14 and living in desperate poverty. Mouchette’s – Little Fly’s – alcoholic mother is dying; her drunken father is clueless. When she does arrive at school, even the teacher taunts her. On her way home she takes shelter from the rain in the hut of a thuggish epileptic poacher, Arsène, and overhears an argument that may have led to the death of one of those involved in it. She promises Arsène she will not betray him. “Looking into his face . . . it seemed to be the first human face she had ever really looked at.” He rapes her, yet she feels love for him. There are echoes of Zola, of Maupassant and, most interestingly, of James Stephens’s The Charwoman’s Daughter (1912). First published in 1937, Mouchette inspired Flannery O’Connor. More than seven decades later it retains its brutal power and pathos.

Eileen Battersby